Code Club - sign up competition

This term Woodbridge Primary school is experimenting with an after school club sign up session. A bit like Freshers week I would imagine but without all the social add ons.

So to try and differentiate Code Club from all the other clubs (and there is a lot of competition this term) I have decided to run a competition during the sign up session and to try and link it to the KS2 Computer Science curriculum that will be with us in September.

The following is a bit of a mix of Algorithms and Programs but it will be interesting to see how Code Clubbers get on with this, especially the 9 girls that went to BT Adastral Park and competed in the CoSpace taster day last term.

Following on from the RoboCup CoSpace day I have been tinkering a little bit with robots etc. I have a "work in progress" robot that I hope will eventually mimic much of the functionality of the virtual robots in the CoSpace challenge. As of now it just has motor functions and "edge" detection using a reflective IR sensor.

At the moment it is programmed to detect either a white line or the edge of a table/platform (or black tape for a less risky option) and take evasive action. It works well when approaching at a reasonably steep angle but fails miserably when approaching at a shallow angle (one central sensor is not enough and will be fixed soon).

So the challenge for our KS2 pupils will be to specify what the robot is doing in a single sentence and then reverse engineer the robots actions into an exact algorithm/program.

A Mind Set programmable robot goes to the winner.

For those who are interested the robot chassis is a Sparkfun Magician chassis, the controller is an Arduino Uno with an Arduino Motor shield and the sensor is a Pololu QTR-1RC infra-red reflectance sensor.